Gary Le Strange

BIOGRAPHY

Waen Shepherd has been a core figure on the British character comedy scene for the past decade. In the guise of New Romantic pop star Gary Le Strange, he wrote and performed the critically acclaimed stage show Polaroid Suitcase, which won him the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003 and the Chortle Best Newcomer Award in 2004. As Le Strange, Waen became a regular cast member on the BBC Radio 2 series The Day the Music Died and Out to Lunch, writing two further solo stage shows, Face Academy and Beef Scarecrow, and recording three comedy albums to promote them. Such was the impact of Le Strange that in 2006, The Times placed him in a list of the UK's Top 50 comedians, and The Rough Guide to British Cult Comedy named him one of Britain's Top 50 Cult Comedy Icons of the past thirty years.

As a comic actor, Waen has played many diverse roles including space hero Captain Helix in two series of BBC 2’s sci-fi sitcom Hyperdrive, various villains in BBC 3's We are Klang and dodgy Geography teacher John "Paedo" Kennedy in E4’s The Inbetweeners. As a composer and comedy songwriter, Waen has written music and lyrics for a whole heap of TV pilots, radio shows, stage plays and internet projects no one has ever seen or heard of, in the process of which his words have been sung by talents as diverse as Lucy Montgomery, Rich Fulcher, Isy Suttie and Connie Fisher. More recently he won the prize for Most Original Composition in Spectrasonics' OMG-1 contest and since then has written the theme tunes and incidental scores for two series of Tiger Aspect's 'Crackanory' (for UKTV channel Dave) and 'Murder in Successville' for BBC 3. In between releasing new material as Gary Le Strange, Waen is currently writing his debut feature film score for psychological horror 'The Ghoul' (due for release in 2016).

He currently lives in London, England, with his beautiful wife Katy and four stuffed animals.